Heat, Stubble & a few Finds! Detecting season has begun!

Rain, which was almost relentless greeted us from 6am through to destination last Saturday,arriving at the Farm I was relieved to see two things, one of our favourite fields had been cut and the weather had decided to buck its ideas up. After a quick chat with the Landowner we were soon building our Detectors ready for the challenge of stubble. I always take 3 coils with me, sometimes you never know whats going to greet you and with these 6-8 inch rods of steel then you need the right tools to tackle it, I decided to go with the Cors Fortune coil on my Teknetics G2+, light, sensitive and handy to navigate through this carpet of hell. My Body Harness was fitted which holds my finds box, water, probe,keys and then I was off, I was looking for the areas that had been flattened off by the Farmers machinery and sure enough I found a decent patch about the size of two tennis courts that were almost flat, nice and slow working through the iron I managed to winkle out some buttons, a late medieval Buckle and a damaged Tudor spoon handle, the rest of the targets leading up to lunch time were lead and the odd shot-gun shell. No coins which was curious as this field has produced coinage from Roman times right up to the modern age, numerous amounts of them too. A quick bite to eat and a look at what my detecting mate had found and we were back at it, the sun was intense with the occasional breeze developing to cool us down, I decided to move into the heavier stubble and started hitting a few targets, an early lead bag seal came to light with nice decoration, a smattering of copper half pennies from the Georgian period and the usual buttons, broken, full, large & small, all enough to frustrate you! By mid-afternoon I hit double figures on the copper coins, all blank and worn out, then a slightly deeper target had me unearthing a dagger chape of the common type, soon after a ring brooch pin was found and Gary winkled out a nice Hammered silver penny of Edward, a little later he had another silver coin, this time a sixpence of Victoria, all coming from one area of the field, finds after that seemed to dry up a little with a medieval buckle plate coming to light and even more copper coins!, The stubble tried its best to beat us but we persevered and never gave up, we both knew the longer areas of stubble masked out better finds but we will be back once the plough goes in and turns it over, once flattened off the field should produce some choice finds for us once again, Roll on September for that to happen. Driving back I decided to spend a little time looking at other fields that we have access to and was surprised how many were on stubble, so for us the season has really begun after a stop-start few weeks, I will try my best to do a blog each time we go, and hope to be able to winkle out some good stuff leading up to Autumn and beyond.